settler colonial studies blog

Writing on writing from the frontier: Anna Johnston, Elizabeth Webby (eds), Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier, Sydney University Press, 2021

12May21

Excerpt: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop spiritedly identified her contribution “to the original literature of the colony”, when promoting her poem “The Star of the South” in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1842. Her new song was “an offering to the people of New South Wales”. She celebrated a newly formed society, populated by “sons and daughters of the land” who were privileged to inhabit “happy homes and altars free” where they found refuge and rest. Admiring Australia’s opportunities, Dunlop awarded the “moral bulwarks of a nation to this young country”.

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Settler possessions: Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, ‘Possessing Land, Wind and Water in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca’, Australian Feminist Studies, 2021

10May21

Abstract: This article examines the connection between Indigenous women’s bodies, their relationship to land and resistance to resource extraction in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. First, I explore the processes and practices through which natural resource extraction is expanded into the Global South to demonstrate that Indigenous lands are produced as wastelands that only acquire value through settler states’ imposition of land uses and ownership. Second, I show how Indigenous relations to land are simultaneously central to Indigenous struggles against territorial dispossession and Indigenous women’s struggles against gendered violence. Operationalising the concept of ‘body land’, I illustrate how relationships to territory are constituted and fragmented over time, shaping Indigenous women’s embodied experiences and transformational political capacities.

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Parallel intifadas: Chandni Desai, ‘Disrupting Settler-Colonial Capitalism: Indigenous Intifadas and Resurgent Solidarity from Turtle Island to Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2021

10May21

Abstract: This article explores the resurgence of Indigenous/Palestine solidarity during the Wet’suwet’en land sovereignty struggle in Canada that took place around the same time Donald Trump’s Middle East “peace plan” was released in early 2020. Historicizing this resurgence within a longer period of anti-colonial resistance, the article attends to the distinct historical, political-economic, and juridical formations that undergird settler colonialism in Canada and Israel/Palestine. It contends with the theoretical limits of the settler-colonial framework, pushing back against narratives of settler success, and shows how anti-colonial resistance accelerated economic crises that led both settler states to enter into “negotiations” with the colonized (reconciliation in one case, and peace talks in the other) as a strategy to maintain capitalist settler control over stolen lands. The analysis also sheds light on a praxis of solidarity that has implications for movement building and joint struggle.

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Settler colonising ceremony itself: Stacie Swain, ‘Ceremony and the symbolic re-appropriation of indigeneity: A feminist critique of settler colonialism in a progressive liberal democratic nation-state’, in Kathleen McPhillips, Naomi Goldenberg (eds), The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State, Routledge, 2020

06May21

Abstract: This chapter brings the field of critical religion and Naomi Goldenberg’s vestigial state theory into conversation with critiques of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. The central question investigates how discourses on religion, race and gender that enable the liberal democratic nation-state to appear progressive can also function to occlude ongoing settler colonialism. To address this question, the chapter performs a critical discourse analysis of the Liberal Party of Canada’s campaign during the 2015 federal election and the November 4th swearing-in ceremony. Drawing on Indigenous feminist and resurgence scholarship that problematizes the politics of recognition and inclusion, this chapter argues that the symbolic re-appropriation of Indigeneity bolsters the Canadian settler state’s presumed political authority without transforming foundational power imbalances. The chapter concludes that a feminist reinvention of the state, particularly one using the language of sovereignty to deconstruct heteropatriarchy and advance liberatory aims, must take settler colonialism into account.

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Settler Canada’s genocides: Sidney L. Harring, ‘”Shooting a Black Duck”: Genocidal Settler Violence against Indigenous Peoples and the Creation of Canada’, in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies, Routledge, 2019

06May21

Abstract: Canada has a foundational myth of a peaceful frontier, settled according to the rule of law. In this view Native people were protected by the Crown and the legal system and were peacefully incorporated into a now-thriving, multicultural society. This is in contrast to the many violent Indian wars of the neighbouring United States. On a broader scale, this is also held in contrast to the violence suffered by Indigenous peoples in other British colonial societies — Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The end result in all these countries was, however, the same: Native people were forced from their land to live in poverty, their cultures destroyed, while white settlers became rich developing all this now-empty land.

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Against algorithmic settler colonialism: Joshua D. Miner, ‘Critical Protocols in Indigenous Gamespace’, Games and Culture, 2021

04May21

Abstract: This article examines Indigenous video games that critique mainstream environmental politics at the level of mechanics. An analysis of video games’ influences on ecological values requires looking beyond the representational to the mechanical relationships between player and software. As a cultural–computational medium, video games are embedded with ethics of interaction that inflect this representational dimension by requiring that players generate the text as participant. With the recent visibility of Indigenous rights movements, developers have embedded Indigenous cultural protocols in the mechanical interactions (or technical protocols) of gameplay. In the context of critique, their integration produces “critical protocols,” configurations of gamic action that encourage players to evaluate their treatment of real-world environments. Critical protocols emerge between the technical and cultural, where scripts for interaction in algorithmic spaces intervene in affirmative game design and work as an analog beyond the game. Indigenous developers call for new ways of computing and critiquing settler digitality through play. These games aim toward representational as well as computational sovereignty.

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Italian settlers: Roberta Biasillo, Claudio de Majo, Daniele Valisena, ‘Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations’, Modern Italy, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

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Celebrating settler diversity celebrates settler colonialism: Daisy Raphael, ‘”Triumph through Diversity”? The War of 1812 Commemoration and Settler-Colonial Myth Making’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Canadian Studies scholars have tended to explain former Conservative Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s nationalist vision as one focused on creating an image of Canada as a “Warrior Nation.” Studies of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 from 2012–15 situate it within this attempt to erase liberal multicultural narratives in favour of an emphasis on whiteness, Britishness, and military masculinity. This article argues, however, that the 1812 commemoration relied upon discourses of diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion, and reconciliation at the same time that it reinforced settler-colonial whiteness. A new monument unveiled on Parliament Hill in 2015, for example, represents the War of 1812 as a moment of “Triumph through Diversity.” In the context of polarizing debates around nation, monuments, and reconciliation, this article illustrates that attempts to produce a more “diverse” commemoration do not necessarily challenge settler colonialism.

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The security of settlers: Ahmad H. Sa’di, ‘Israel’s settler-colonialism as a global security paradigm’, Race & Class, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Israeli surveillance industries are well integrated in the global surveillance market. This incorporation is achieved through marketisation, labour processes and the circulation of capital. Even Israel has been considered by many as a successful securitising model. In this article, it is argued that this success is the outcome of several factors, including the shared premises of Israel’s settler-colonial regime and neoliberal data-based globalised capitalism, which has become a leading sector in the current economic formation. Furthermore, it reflects the advent of the securitising states and concurrently the rise of the security-industrial complex in the US and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Yet, the acceptance of Israeli-settler colonial surveillance methods and Weltanschauung as a model points to the erosion of hitherto cherished values such as privacy, trust, autonomy, care and solidarity.

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Opposing settler colonialism: Omar Barghouti, ‘BDS: Nonviolent, Globalized Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s Settler Colonialism and Apartheid’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2021

04May21

Abstract: Despite its military, diplomatic, and economic power, Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid still views the nonviolent, Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a “strategic threat” to its system of injustice, waging a protracted war against the movement accordingly. This essay aims to contextualize Israel’s war on BDS by examining the movement’s origins, principles, impact, and theory of change. It analyzes the most critical challenges BDS is facing and its most promising strengths, especially its balancing of ethical principles with strategic effectiveness and its intersectional approach to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality.

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